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Linux

Linux Photoshop, Lightroom, and Apple Aperture alternatives (Bibble aka. AfterShot)

I’ve used Linux on and off for many years. Although, the last few years my primary desktop computer is Linux only (On Kubuntu at the moment). The big issue with Linux is that many large commercial applications (and games) don’t offer a native build for Linux or even acknowledge that it exists. I spend a good deal of time producing content such as photos or videos. This is a problem.

I’ve settled with Kdenlive for video editing. It’s good enough for what I do at the moment and my experience with commercial NLE was not that extensive, so I don’t know what I’m missing (I own a copy of premiere 5.1 and Sony Vegas Platinum). The biggest issue is Photoshop, because I can’t find anything to replace it. What I do now is open up batches of RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw, tweak them by hand and save the changes, and then run a batch process in Photoshop itself. The whole process works alright. I would use Bridge for the editing step, but that doesn’t work well at all in WINE (Windows emulation). Photoshop is also a bit slow and some aspects like the “File Info…” window doesn’t even function at all.

I noticed some users on PentaxForums.com mention a piece of software called Bibble (now known as Corel AfterShot). It sounded good except for one flaw some of the users mentioned.

The Pentax k5 Corel AfterShot (Bibble) Highlight Issue…

As you can see, those red highlights are a big problem. I tried some minimal tweaking, but that didn’t seem to help remove the odd coloration.

The frustrating thing is that the program seems very functional and fast. Besides the other issue of it being unable to load Adobe created DNGs (I converted many of my old Fuji RAWs and *ist DS RAWs to DNG), I think it would be worth picking up.